8 to 524 KByte RAM, 8 MByte Storage: IBM's System/360 Turns 60 Years Old
owl writes:
Once upon a time, 60 years ago, IBM (International Business Machines) presented a computer architecture that was revolutionary at the time: the IBM System/360. The IBM System/360 was officially unveiled on April 7, 1964, when modern PCs and server technology for supercomputers were still unthinkable.
Decades before Windows, 3.5-inch hard disks, CDs or SSDs, IBM had been developing a computer architecture since 1961 that the company referred to as the "5 billion dollar gamble". An investment that would either secure IBM's future or destroy the company's specialized computer business. At that time, IBM was producing computers specifically for one application (to put it simply). Upgrades were expensive and required lots of resources.
But the bet paid off and IBM's System/360 became a success with what are now absurdly puny performance figures by today's standards. The RAM? From 8 KByte as the minimum up to a luxurious 524 KByte as the maximum. This was actually a lot.
To put this into perspective: the Atari 2600 console, which appeared over a decade later, had just 128 bytes of RAM. Yes, that's right, 128 characters for the RAM. It wasn't until a few years later that so-called "superchips" in the cartridges made it possible to multiply the RAM. And even then, 20 years later, the basic configuration did not even come close to IBM's System/360.
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